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Question
Any of you miss working on a team?
I'm a solo founder.
I love what I do but apart from speaking with clients I don't really talk to anybody. I talk to myself a lot. I used to work on an engineering team and I liked talking through problems with other people.
Any of you miss that?
I love what I do but apart from speaking with clients I don't really talk to anybody. I talk to myself a lot. I used to work on an engineering team and I liked talking through problems with other people.
Any of you miss that?
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I miss that sometimes to a small extent, but I really, really enjoy autonomy and not having to convince anyone of anything - so much so that I've accepted not having a team around me at least for the time being. My feelings might change in a few years time, we'll see.
The autonomy is definitely great. I also love the range of problems I get to solve. It's the best creative outlet I've ever found. I'm considering light freelance work though. It might be the best of both worlds.
I've tried freelance before - close but no cigar. At the end of the day, you still have a boss and someone telling you how to spend your time and when tasks are supposed to be done by which date in which order -> which is what I hate. I think I just have authority problems in general so YMMV
Yep. It's one of the trade-offs being a solo founder. But the rest still outweigh it for me.
There are ways around it, though. For example, I have standing meetings with friends all over the industry where I can bounce ideas, architectures, and implementations off them. It's important to keep your network going and fresh. Another thing I do is to look for meetups with likeminded people, which is a good way to get to know new people and bounce ideas.
I also sometimes outsource a smaller project and I'd have a coworker for a couple of weeks. ;-)
Definitely some great ideas here. Thanks!
Sometimes. But then when I talk to friends who still work with teams I'm reminded of how tedious it was to be in constant meetings, reviews and poorly implemented scrum and then I'm happy to be solo.
Don't think I'll ever go back.
Yeah, the recurring meetings were brutal. Near the end of my time in big tech, I had probably 80-90% of my time dominated by recurring useless meetings, design reviews, etc. I hadn't actually built a thing or directly delivered any value in 6 months at which point I decided it was time to go and do my own thing to gain full control of my time.
For real, taking weeks to actually get a something planned before it could be developed. Now I just work on what I want when I want, it's amazing.
It's interesting to hear the diversity of experience. I worked at a startup and I built a lot of stuff. Like all day everyday. Close to no meetings. Mostly ad hoc stuff with product managers and other engineers. Bigger companies though I hear is kind of rough depending on the team.
I've seen this from the freelancing side. Having a network and community of peers helps quite a lot.
I do miss it sometimes (mostly for the esprit de corps while tackling very big projects and for the chit-chat at lunches). But I go way faster when I plan and execute things alone, even when these things are half-baked. At least, it's shipped and I can move on!
Totally agree! I love pushing to prod and never writing unit tests. I also get to make all the technical decisions and keep my codebase manageable. But I do miss the 'esprit de corps' as you say.
I do accountability sessions, we have a call with a friend, sometimes sharing screens, we work on our own things and when we have a break we discuss what we've done and what are we planning to do. If you want, we can try that. Offer extends to others too, but I'm in Australia, mine your TZ.
Thank you so much @igas! What a nice offer. Sounds fun.